Seniors housing: Pieces of the puzzle (with video)

Putting them together may take time, but the power boomers yield will see that it gets done

From left: Phyllis Cummings, Dorothy Allen and Jessie Paterson are among up to 10 independent seniors who can live at Abbeyfield House.

Photograph by: Jean Levac
, Ottawa Citizen

Pinning me with a no-nonsense look, 96-year-old Phyllis Cummings says that when it came time to give up her apartment seven years ago, she chose Abbeyfield House on Parkdale Avenue because “the other (residences) I looked at were too big. This is a house; you’re not a number here.”

In fact, most institutions, even the largest, do at least strive for intimacy. But you can see her point. Abbeyfield, part of an international non-profit organization, is a brick Victorian house with a front garden and veranda. Residents have their own bed-sitting rooms with an ensuite and individual temperature controls, but share meals at a large dining room table next to the busy kitchen.

Designed for up to 10 independent seniors (there’s no on-site medical service), the home is close to bustling Wellington Street. Rent including meals is $1,860 a month.

It’s also one model — albeit still a rare one — for meeting the housing needs of a rapidly aging population.

The latest census figures from Statistics Canada forecast a spike in the over-65 age group to 22.8 per cent of the population in 2031 from 14.8 per cent in 2011.

As boomers age, many are already finding maintenance-intensive suburban homes impractical. How will the housing market respond over the next two decades?

According to Avi Friedman, a professor of architecture at McGill University with a special interest in housing, “Many baby boomers will live well into their 80s, so the next 20 or 25 years in housing will be governed by them looking for suitable accommodation.”

He sees a boom in smaller apartments in densely populated urban areas to accommodate the reduced space requirements and fixed incomes of seniors.

Purpose-built apartment construction has tailed off dramatically across Canada, so an aging population could ignite a boom in either apartment construction or give new buoyancy to the current craze among small investors for purchasing and renting out condo units.

Friedman also forecasts a renovation explosion.

In part, that will be fuelled by children of later-stage baby boomers (those born between roughly 1956 and 1964), who are sharing homes with their parents as a continuing lacklustre economy and soaring house prices make it difficult for that younger generation, in some cases with their own children in tow, to live independently.

Having tenants, family or otherwise, could also help boomers whose nest eggs have dwindled since the economic maelstrom of 2008.

Also igniting renovations will be boomers retooling their homes with grab bars and walk-in showers so they can age in place rather than having to move as the disabilities of age overtake them.

“Large retailers are positioning themselves for this now,” says Friedman. “You’re seeing grab bars and remote control openers on shelves that you didn’t see before.”

Renovations for aging in place can be expensive: $10,000 or more for a bathroom makeover, for example. Better to buy a house built according to universal design principles — straight staircases, for example, to allow installation of chair lifts — in the first place. Savvy builders will clamber aboard the universal design bandwagon in coming years.

The 2006 version of Ontario’s building code already requires that newly constructed multi-unit residential buildings meet such accessibility requirements as a barrier-free path of travel throughout common areas. Seniors with disabilities could benefit from that. As well, at least 10 per cent of apartment or condo units must allow barrier-free travel through the suite entrance door to the doorway of at least one bathroom and have at least one bedroom on the same level. Enhanced requirements are currently under consideration.

Allan Moscovitch, a professor in Carleton University’s School of Social Work whose specialties include housing policy, says boomers are in better health at retirement than preceding generations and want freedom from snow-shovelling while remaining independent.

This should lead to an uptick in contracted services such as grounds maintenance and housekeeping, either for existing, individual homes or even in seniors’ enclaves, like the age-restricted condo buildings that could start sprouting.

As always, the kicker is cost. The Ontario government, as part of its Aging at Home Strategy, recently increased the budget for personal support workers, whose services include light housekeeping, by three million hours over three years. But while that may mean an extra hour or so of paid-for care a day, seniors could still wind up paying for a lot themselves even though aging at home is touted by government and health-care experts as reducing overall costs to the country.

While homes can be renovated to accommodate those with milder dementia, the total number of people with dementia in Canada is expected to double by 2038. That means the number of nursing homes will have to increase. The physical disabilities of aging will add to that. As it now stands, wait times for admittance to a nursing home in Ontario have tripled since 2005, according to the seniors’ advocacy organization CARP.

Whether new nursing homes are large, institutional settings or the more human-sized varieties found in some Scandinavian countries, where spending on social services is higher than in North America, will depend on us as a society. Current government cost-cutting and our tradition of shunting aside the frail and elderly don’t augur well for a Scandinavian-style future.

Affordable housing for low-income seniors, a particularly vulnerable group, will also need to increase dramatically even though the poverty rate among Canadian seniors has tumbled over the past four decades, thanks in part to the introduction of public pension plans. Wait times to get into an Ottawa Community Housing seniors-only building, for example, is two to five years.

“Few organizations are taking the lead on social housing,” says Moscovitch. “The private sector won’t do it and the non-profits can’t” because they don’t have the funds.

Mark Taylor, councillor for Ottawa’s Bay ward, is co-chair of the advisory group for the city’s Older Adult Plan. Now in development, the plan is intended to better dovetail municipal programs, services and facilities with seniors’ needs. Housing is among the OAP’s components.

While the plan won’t be ready for public consultation until later this summer, Taylor says potential solutions to seniors’ housing needs could include converting more regular Ottawa Community Housing units to seniors-only units or subsidizing aging in place renovations for those on fixed incomes.

What a greying population spells for the suburbs is anyone’s guess. Will seniors, fed up with grass-cutting and endless driving just to shop, abandon the ’burbs in droves for the hip, downtown condo life? Or will the suburbs and rural areas grow as more young families join the seniors who, as noted in a City of Ottawa staff report last year, tend to stay where they are as they age?

Claude and France Lamarche are worried their two-storey suburban home will become a millstone around their necks.

The 71-year-old couple wants to stay in their Orléans community but can’t find suitable downsizing accommodation.

They’ve looked at condos, but prices are high and floor space limited. Besides, says Claude, in a condo “you never know if a bunch of kids are going to be having parties next door at two in the morning.”

He wonders if the city could persuade developers to set aside a portion of all condo buildings as seniors-only floors.

The city can’t force builders’ hands that way, says Taylor, but he believes builders will recognize the opportunities afforded by an aging marketplace.

Technology will also play an ever-greater role in seniors’ housing.

As recently reported in the Citizen, for example, the University of Ottawa Heart Institute is remotely monitoring the health of about 150 elderly patients who live at home. Patients use technology to record their blood pressure and other vital signs and download the information by phone to the hospital. Medication can be tweaked, visits to the hospital have been slashed and aging in place becomes a bit more viable.

Technology such as GrandCare Systems uses the Internet to monitor blood pressure, wake-up times, door openings and other information so, for example, a son or daughter could remotely keep tabs on an elderly parent living alone. GrandCare is not yet available in Ottawa, but has made inroads in Barrie and elsewhere.

Add to all this the fact that boomers have both mammoth voting and purchasing power, persuasive social media and other technologies at their disposal, and a general sense that the universe should unfold as they expect it to and their housing needs just may be fulfilled in the decades to come.

Says Friedman, himself a boomer, “Pieces of the puzzle exist. We’ll see them coming together in the coming years.”

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